Mr Smith Stays In Oregon

Where's this guy been? Why haven't we seen him before?

Closed Loop Sustainability

hat tip = nonny mouse at Crooks and Liars

If You're Stupid And You Know It

I always have a hard time thinking there are people who actually believe this shit. I really do try to think more highly of my neighbors and countrymen, but I have to admit (to myself anyway) that DumFux News wouldn't put it on the air if it wasn't working.

hat tip = Media Matters for America



And the kicker is that the Boca Raton city government was being threatened with lawsuits - not by the evil forces of atheism (which is always the inference invited by the middle school melodrama that is DumFux News), but by "Religious Groups" who were always loudly demanding ever more sectarian displays.  And Jesus wept.

Read all about it.

Dear Governor Perry

hat tip = Balloon Juice

A Money Shot

Given the Clown College visage of the Repub stable of primary candidates, Obama should be a prohibitive favorite for re-election in 2012.  But it's likely to be a close one, and the good folks at Mother Jones can confirm our suspicions as to why that is.

(click the pic and be amazed)

News Poodles

DumFux News viewers got an eyeful recently. (hat tip = Democratic Underground) Some points of emphasis: First, Eva Golinger's comments starting at about 1:45. Second, CNN screwed up on some of its coverage too, but they aired the appropriate correction/apology. Third, DumFux News, of course, made no such attempts to correct the record that I've been able to find (and the original video has mysteriously disappeared from foxnews.com). Which very much reinforces my assertion that when you see this shit on DumFux News, it's no mistake.

Today's Pix

I'm comin' for ya, pretty boy.

New Music

By way of a friend in Oregon (Steve Pancoast - Piece of the Wind):
He referred to this young woman as his niece, but with Pancoast, ya never really know.  Doesn't matter. This video is the best I could find, and while the production values are sketchy, the talent of the players is pretty obvious. And you can follow the link at the bottom to Amazon and sample the tunes as produced in studio.
 

Post Racial Debunked

As if anybody paying any attention at all needs to be convinced or reminded, all mutterings about how "we elected a black guy president and that means we've all gotten over that whole racism thing now" can be officially stamped HORSESHIT.

Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president's ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data.

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.
"I'm just astounded by those numbers," said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department's pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office's practices that would have skewed the recommendations. "I can recall several African Americans getting pardons."

The full story at Pro Publica.

And a great rundown at Balloon Juice (includes video from The Rachel Maddow Show).

Selectively Predictive

Once upon a time, we heard a lot of blather from the "right" about what we could infer about future events, based on our observations of things happening in a certain place, at a certain time, and in a certain order.

My example here is when Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice were always going on about "the obvious nexus" of Al-Qaeda, Iraq, and WMD.  They put these things together like the pieces of a matched set, and they used it to sell a specific plan of action.

Not to shift gears too abruptly here, but how come the rubes are always willing to buy all the phony shit using the Nexus Argument, and then completely ignore something that's real, and should be just as obvious about the Nexus of Economic Desperation and Access to Firearms?

From Crooks and Liars:

The 38-year-old woman entered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission office in downtown Laredo on Monday afternoon and demanded to speak to a supervisor, said investigator Joe Baeza of the Laredo Police Department.

The woman, whom he declined to identify, pulled out a handgun and started walking through the office, threatening several employees, he said.

And now there are 2 motherless kids in critical condition in a Texas hospital.

Blind Zealotry

Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is a wealthy, and oh so 'conservative' DC suburb - and the sense of Entitled Victimhood is sometimes just a little overwhelming.  Especially when that feeling makes you miss the fucking point entirely.

From Leesburg Today (hat tip to Wonkette):

"I am very upset with what has happened here with this holiday as have been since several holidays ago. This is Christmas," Bill Rusciolelli said. Rusciolelli said he "respects the decision for people to petition and be allowed to represent their beliefs," but said it went too far when displays are allowed that mock religion and religious beliefs of many residents.

Leesburg attorney and father of three, Jack Hanssen said he believed if the board knew what would result, the language governing the displays would have been written differently, and added that the crucified Santa is a "direct attack" on religion.

It is certainly about as close as you come to a burning cross as I have ever seen," he said.

Read the story and be amazed.

Occupy Explained

From Mother Jones:

Americans are not opposed to the rich getting richer—as John Steinbeck is said to have noted, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But this prospect only satisfies so long as people believe that with luck and hard work, their ship, or at least their kids' ship, may some day come in. In a system overrun by piracy—a system in which the pirates also, sorry to stretch the metaphor, run the Navy—the dream becomes hard to sustain.

Seemed Like A Good Idea

Occupy Melbourne protesters seemed to have hit on a way to thwart efforts to evict them from the park by wearing their tents as clothing. The police had other ideas. If mayors and police chiefs would stop giving Occupiers something to push back against, the thing would most likely just fizzle and die. I guess authoritarians aren't equipped to understand that.

Another War Of Independence

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.

Coates describes the Civil War being characterized as a tragedy in the white-folk narrative, but points out that it was, in fact, the War For Freedom for black-folk (more broadly, a step towards a more perfect union, but when the main cause is slavery and the main outcome is freedom for black-folk, then it's not a big stretch).

If I look at the Civil War in that light, I can take the circumstances leading up to the American Revolution and the Civl War and the Labor Riots and The 30s and The 60s; overlay them onto what's been bubbling up since the 2008 Implosion, and I can see a truer meaning of the phrase "freedom ain't free".

Remember that it's never about what the popular narrative tell us it's about.

Hacked By Iran

So here's something I hope somebody on our side's been working on really hard.

From Empty Wheel:

I’ve been saying for some time that America’s hubris about drones will end as soon as one of our antagonists figures out how to hack them.

Which is why it’s interesting that Iran has updated its claims to have “shot down” an American drone to suggest they had “brought it down.” (Note, I found this statement on the Mehr website, but not the Fars one.)

And won't it be interesting in a few years (maybe a lot sooner) when we start to hear about the need to build a defensive shield capable of shooting down enemy drones which could be launched from any seemingly innocuous vessel from a few miles off the shores of Virginia or New York or or or.

I've been worried that "our enemies" would develop a way to deliver an EMP device into the general vicinity of over-flying American aircraft, which would disable the avionics (for even a short time), which would result in our planes falling from the sky in large numbers.
Now I see we have a fuckload more to worry about.  Ain't that just won-fuckin'-derful?

It's the dawning of a New Golden Age of Paranoid Isolation in America.

(hat tip = The Agonist)